Selects: How Enron Fooled the World

Until 2007, the largest single corporate bankruptcy was Enron, a $67 billion energy trading company. Its decline was breathtaking, and while it’s a fascinating story of corporate malfeasance and greed, it’s also about the lives of ruined workers. Learn all about it in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:29Josh Clark?

  Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Hey guys, it's me, Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen our 2023 episode on the Enron scandal. It's a pretty interesting episode, at the very least, just because of the mind-bogglingly nut stuff that these guys did, all in the pursuit of money and personal gain. Not only did they swindle entire states, they also, as a nice cherry on top, wiped out the life savings of thousands of their own employees. It's the kind of thing that was such a big deal, it left a stain on American society as a whole, just by how cynical it made everybody about what people can get away with just

• 2:14Josh Clark?

  in the pursuit of wealth. At any rate, I hope you enjoy this episode. It's a good one.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:33Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. And it's Stuff You Should Know. We mean it. You should know this stuff. Because this is some serious corporate malfeasance that I think there's probably not an American over the age of 20 walking around who doesn't know about this somehow, some way, to some degree. I know they teach about this stuff in business school. It's been written on extensively. But I mean, I didn't understand the ins and outs of it until, until I started researching this. And it's quite shocking. And that shocking thing that I'm talking about is the rise and

• 3:12Josh Clark?

  fall of Enron, one of the greatest swindles in corporate American history, maybe in corporate history in the world, definitely in corporate American history.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  For sure. I'm really glad you picked this because I didn't know all the ins and outs either. Because this is, you know, when I was a young, late twenties, early thirty something, didn't have a care in the world.

• 3:35Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  And I finally watched The Smartest Guys in the Room today.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I saw it last night.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, the documentary based on the book. And we'll get to the authors and stuff. It was Peter Elkin and who was the co-author?

• 3:52Josh Clark?

  Bethany McLean. I think she was the lead author even.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. I knew she wrote the original articles.

• 3:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  In Forbes. So she co-authored the book. And she's in the documentary, as is Elkin. And it really is worth the watch. But just want to point out that this is an overview of the Enron scandal. It's pretty clear, once you start poking around, that this could be like a 10-part series.

• 4:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  And there, there probably is a podcast series out there that covered just Enron. So there's lots of sort of ins and outs that we won't be able to touch on. But we can definitely give you the overview, which was that Enron was a corporation. Originally, it was a natural gas line, pipeline operator.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  But they quickly, well, not quickly, they got out of that business almost entirely. When certain people were hired, and we'll sort of get to all this in a minute, too.

• 4:48Josh Clark?

  Certain people, you're right.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  When certain people were hired that basically said, you know what? We shouldn't even be in the pipeline industry. We should invent almost a new kind of industry, which is to use energy as financial instruments. And we should become a trading company that trades natural gas and eventually paper pulp and electricity and you name it. Like, we'll get into all the things that they sort of pivoted to. But Inround started, I guess we should start at the beginning, when they, in 1985, when Houston Natural Gas Company merged with a company called InterNorth.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  And they combined to form this large energy corporation in Texas, mainly natural gas. And the chief executive of HNG at the time was a man named Ken or Kenneth Lay, who you might have heard of.

• 5:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and if you haven't prepared to meet Ken Lay several times across this episode. From the outset, I think Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth were both profitable. But I saw that neither one of the companies really benefited from the merger, although it did expand their pipeline network. Really, it just protected them from a hostile takeover.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  But it was just a standard gas company, you know, no big frills or anything like that. I think the first year, it posted a $14 million loss. Put that in your hat and smoke it later with a pin.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:28Josh Clark?

  In that. The first year Enron was around, in 1985, it posted a $14 million loss. Just remember that for later, okay?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, something else you should put in your hat for later is the fact that Kenneth Lay, the gentleman I mentioned, who was the CEO of Houston Natural Gas, was also very, very tight with the Bush family.

• 6:50Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Originally, the elder Bush, and later on, George W., as governor of Texas, big donor to their causes politically, and they ended up having a very sort of, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, kind of relationship.

• 7:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, like, I just started twirling around over and over again out of anger, like, multiple times throughout the documentary, because they really go into some good details about that. But the upshot of the whole thing is George H.W. and George W. Bush would not probably have been able to help Enron out as much as they did had it not been for, of course, Ronald Reagan and the sweeping deregulations that occurred in, starting in the 80s. There was just a spirit of deregulation, which was, as Ronald Reagan said, and they quoted in the documentary, "Government's not the solution to our problems. Government is the

• 7:49Josh Clark?

  problem." And there was this idea that was really huge in the 80s, that if you got government out of the way, competition was going to drive innovation, was going to lower prices, was going to benefit society in myriad ways. That is not untrue. The problem is, when you deregulate fully and just basically say, "We're checked out from now on until something really bad happens," something bad always happens. That's the problem with deregulation in the 80s. Not that there's a problem with deregulation, that it was done incorrectly, like, it seems to be every single time.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, Reagan is also, in the documentary, quoted as talking about the magic of the marketplace. And we've talked about this over and over on the show, and this is not an attack on conservatism, but deregulation in the marketplace and letting the free market decide things is one of the core tenets of conservatism generally. And what we've always kind of hammered home year after year is, and you've said it in one way, but I'll say it in another, is it never takes into account, humans are the ones that are operating these systems. And when you have money, lots and lots of money, and you have humans operating systems, there are inevitably going to be greedy humans with

• 9:11Speaker 03

  so much hubris that they sell their souls to make money. And that's, that's what happens every single time, yet it's still, lessons are still not learned, that, that there are certain kinds of humans, and they always seems to be, they always seem to be the ones in charge here of these systems. They will take advantage of them to the detriment of the little guy and the little lady. And that is the 100% what happened with Enron.

• 9:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I don't know if it's always like, they're not taking into account, human greed. I think most of the people who are powerful enough to deregulate federal energy regulations, don't really care in a lot of cases. They know that they're going to make a boatload of money by the time the thing really kind of blows up sometime down the line.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:59Josh Clark?

  I think it could be either one. But the, there was a big sea change in 1984, a big change to regulation. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said, hey, you can now buy and sell gas, natural gas, from any seller, anywhere in the United States. You don't have to just buy and sell within your state. And that opened up an entirely new market. And all of a sudden, you can make a lot more money moving this stuff around. But like you said, they figured out at Enron, you can make even more money by selling this stuff as commodities, and trading on like futures, and turning them into financial

• 10:43Josh Clark?

  instruments, not actual just natural gas, or oil, or electricity, but the concepts of them, the right to sell it, or buy that sometime down the road. And that changed absolutely everything.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is when things, when you get into finance like this, my, it's not that my eyeballs glaze over, it just becomes almost a...

• 11:06Speaker 03

  And I say almost not real because it is kind of not real. It's, it becomes a form of gambling.

• 11:12Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  In a way, and that's very much what happened at Enron in a lot of ways. And you'll, you'll kind of see here and there throughout the episode. But they, as a company, after that 84 decision, made a very faithful decision of their own in 1989, just a few years later, when they got a consulting firm on board, McKinsey and Company, in particular, a consultant for that company named Jeffrey Skilling, to create what they called a gas bank, which was basically like I said earlier, like, hey, why don't we just be an intermediary between buying and selling of gas? And it was going so well that two short years later, Skilling left there and went to work full-time at Enron.

• 11:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's an ongoing theme.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. And eventually working his way up to the CEO of that company.

• 12:01Josh Clark?

  Yes. So he was, he, but for the most part, he was the right-hand man, but essentially co-CEO with Ken Lay, who I think took him on as a protege. And Jeffrey Skilling was the one who said, let's set up this market. And he also transformed the company's culture. One of the things he came up with was the idea that every year, they should review and rate every employee.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 12:29Josh Clark?

  And the bottom 10% of employees should be fired. So every year, he was planning on firing 10% of their workforce. So about 2,000 people every year. And the reason he was doing this is because he's saying, we can do better. We can hire the best and the brightest. We'll replace those people with much better people. And then the ones who are doing really well now will get moved to the back and we'll just constantly be improving on the people that we're hiring. It makes sense in a really Machiavellian kind of way, but it's also psychotic as well.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the way I understood it from the documentary, it wasn't just like regular upper management reviews of the people that, that, that report to them, but it was all the employees rating one another, like within their department. Isn't that right?

• 13:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's what I took it as, too.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  So, I mean, you don't have to like... Be a soothsayer to see where that heads when, and it certainly creates competition if that's what they're all about with, you know, the sort of the charter of the company.

• 13:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Creating more competition by deregulating. They sort of did the same thing within the ranks and created a very, I mean, I've seen it described everywhere as just overly macho and testosterone fueled.

• 13:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  It seems like the traders there were, were hired and kept on that were especially aggressive. And there are interviews in the documentary about, about some of these men who were traders that were like, you would cut the throat of the guy next to you on the trading floor, your fellow employee, if you felt like you could make a few extra bucks.

• 14:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that was very much encouraged, not just by Jeffrey Skilling, but Ken Lay had a history of, of at the very least, turning a blind eye, if not actively encouraging people to break the law, do immoral stuff that may or may not have been legal, all in the interest of maximizing profits. Like if you were making money and you got in trouble, you didn't get fired because you made money for the company. That's all that mattered was making money for the company. So in that sense, Jeffrey Skilling was a really great protege for Ken Lay. But he was like Ken Lay on steroids. And I get the impression, and Ken Lay is always, or back in the day, he was a master at presenting this really laid

• 14:53Josh Clark?

  back, almost detached persona. But if you watch the documentary and you read about him, you really get the impression that he knew exactly what outcome was 10 steps down the road.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:09Josh Clark?

  By just nudging this thing over here, nudging that thing over there, all with plausible deniability. But at the same time, presiding over this incredibly complex, complicated, masterful machination that was all dedicated to the service of making money for, by whatever means possible.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Lay, I mean, the reason the documentary is called The Smartest Guys in the Room is because I think unequivocally, everyone would admit that Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and we should introduce you to a young recruit named Andrew Fastow, who was a key player, eventually becoming the CFO, and was up to all kinds of shenanigans. But these were brilliant guys with amazing ideas, and a lot of the ideas that they had for this company were really good and ahead of their time. But they had the notion that you should be able to trade and make money off of great ideas and not necessarily the results of those great ideas. Because time and time again, as you'll see as we tell

• 16:12Speaker 03

  this story, these ideas were not making actual money. Maybe because some of them were ahead of their time, but that didn't matter because they had ways, very creative ways, to hide those debts and losses. And that's

• 16:26Josh Clark?

  Oh, man.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  That's the whole sort of fall of Enron is wrapped up in that statement. But these are all really, really smart guys, and they were really, really good at making money. And maybe we should take a break there. It's a nice little setup.

• 16:40Josh Clark?

  All right.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  And we'll come back and talk a little bit more about their lobby to deregulate, and then some of the early shenanigans right after this.

• 17:00Speaker 04

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• 17:02Josh Clark?

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• 17:52Josh Clark?

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• 18:05Josh Clark?

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• 18:16Josh Clark?

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• 20:02Josh Clark?

  Okay, so after, about six years after that big deregulation from FERC that said you can buy gas and sell it wherever in the country that opened up a huge market, there was another watershed deregulation that reversed it, an act that went back to 1935. The Public Utilities Holding Company Act, PUC, love that one, that said if you are generating and selling electricity, you are a local utility and we're going to regulate you like you are providing the lifeblood of America because

• 20:39Speaker 03

  They are.

• 20:40Josh Clark?

  Electrical utilities provide the lifeblood of America and have since long before 1935. And in 1990, they managed to get that reversed and now all of a sudden, anybody could buy an electric utility and Enron definitely jumped on that.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. Their lobby was strong, to put it mildly. They hired lobbyists to lobby different states and those states, as no surprise, ended up getting millions of dollars flowing back toward Enron. I think they hired lobbyists for at least 37 states. They also helped overturn a law in 1988 that said the military has to buy power from local utilities and they said, no, let's open that back up. Pretty soon, Enron got a $25 million contract for supplying electricity to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. And these are just,

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I mean, 25 million ends up being peanuts in the grand scheme, but these are just examples as they sort of ramped up to their schemes of how they deregulated or lobbied to get things deregulated such that it was allowed to happen.

• 21:51Josh Clark?

  Right. And one of the things, one of the schemes that got the attention of the entire country in 2000, 2001 was an electrical scheme in California. California had undergone its own electrical deregulation, power deregulation, but it had adopted this weird patchwork compromise.

• 22:14Josh Clark?

  Um, law or set of laws that just had loopholes you could drive a truck through. And that were just really created all sorts of legal gray areas. And so rather than just kind of like here or there biting around the edges, seeing what they could do. Instead, the energy traders at Enron started figuring out how to move energy out of the state. Wait for the state to be like, hey, we need some energy and move it back at incredibly inflated prices. Um, they would purposefully, um, take electrical utilities that they owned offline to generate more demand, a spike in demand, and so they could raise prices again.

• 22:57Josh Clark?

  And they actually basically crippled California. I think I saw that California had, um, a couple dozen blackouts in six months after that deregulation, after Enron started coming in and messing with stuff. Whereas the six months before deregulation, they'd had one blackout. So if you watch the documentary and you listen, you know, you read some other sources about it. This was an entirely fabricated, um, scarcity of electricity. There's plenty of it. Enron just figured out that they could kind of pull this lever and that lever and charge way more by creating this, this fake scarcity.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, and by pulling a lever, it's like literally sometimes they called up a power company, a power plant and said, pull the lever to the off position. And they, they have them on tape, you know, they played this in the documentary. Well, they'll, they called one in Las Vegas and said, hey, man, can you take this thing offline? Uh, for a few hours and, uh, just, just make something up because a, a rolling blackout meant big money. Um, all of a sudden California again was, was buying their own energy back at a higher rate. And Governor Gray Davis at the time, and this is, you know, I'm, I'm not like giving some full throated endorsement to any, um, effectiveness of Gray Davis as a governor, because I really don't know.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  But he definitely was sort of left holding the bag and scratching his head like, what's going on here? Like, we've got plenty of energy and it just, all through the documentary, people are saying like, this just isn't adding up in California. And some of those tapes that they play of these traders, like there was that, that natural, uh, A wildfire that broke out that jeopardized one of the pipelines. And these guys are on, you know, on tape on the phone with each other saying, burn, baby, burn.

• 24:46Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Because that's good for business if it knocks something offline.

• 24:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And is, you know, make laughing at like, you know, old grandmas like sweating in the summer heat.

• 24:56Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Because they can't get air conditioning, like the most vile reprehensible kind of stuff in the name of making the almighty mighty dollar that you could imagine.

• 25:06Josh Clark?

  What's also interesting is they don't really go into detail about it, but it's, it appears to have also been a coup to get rid of Gray Davis and replace him with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:17Josh Clark?

  Because Ken Lay held a meeting at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, and he invited Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was long before Arnold Schwarzenegger was known to have had like real political aspirations. He wasn't governor yet, wasn't running for governor, over a problem that Enron created. It was like that level of, in addition to also just making billions and billions of dollars by strangling the state, they also managed to replace the executive of the state as well to somebody who was much more friendly to them.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and get rid of, and of course they didn't like knock him off or anything, but in California, you can, you can ever recall, it seems to come up every, I don't know, 12 years or so where Californians aren't happy with a governor. And so if a recall vote passes, you can have a, have just an election out of nowhere and replace that governor. While this is going on, you know, Ken Lay stands on a stage and says, we're making money in spite of California, not because of California. So just lying through their teeth on stage to their shareholders. And all, you know, all these little schemes had little nicknames. The one where they got energy out of California just to make them buy it back was called Ricochet.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  There was one called Death Star, and they're on tape like joking about like, hey, let's have a nice friendly name for this one, like Death Star. So they're just, they're playing games with people's livelihood, essentially.

• 26:44Josh Clark?

  And lives, you can make a case as well.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 26:48Josh Clark?

  So, three of those traders pled guilty. Jeffrey Richter, John Forney, and Timothy Belden were three of those traders who manipulated California's energy market, costing the state between forty and forty-five billion dollars in retrospect of unnecessary electrical prices and costs.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  All right, so Enron is doing great. They're making a lot of money. And we should point out, this is just, you know, Ricochet was just one little scheme. They had all sorts of schemes along the way to, well, we'll get to those. Between ninety-six, though, and two thousand and one, like, as far as the stock market world was concerned, Enron was a darling. Fortune named them, I think, six years straight America's most innovative company, every single year in a row.

• 27:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  But what was going on behind the scenes is these ideas and these investments and schemes that they had, you know, some of them made money, but a lot of them didn't make any money at all, and they just became really, really good at hiding that fact.

• 27:54Josh Clark?

  Yes. That was the whole thing. Like, they were very innovative. They were ahead of their time in a lot of ways. Like, they got into building broadband, high-speed internet access in, like, two thousand or two thousand and one, something like that. And this was, I looked it up, it wasn't until two thousand and seven that half of all US internet users had broadband. So, this was way ahead of its time. And then also, they also got into the video-on-demand market. They tried to partner with Blockbuster. And this was, these things were basically like the progenitor of Zoom and Netflix, but these guys were trying this in two thousand, two thousand and one. So, it's visionary. The problem is, they were ahead of their time.

• 28:39Josh Clark?

  The infrastructure wasn't there, the, I think, the customer base even wasn't there. So, their stuff that they were doing wasn't making money, which is not bad in and of itself. What was bad was when they were covering it up. And the schemes that they used to cover it up are so...

• 28:57Josh Clark?

  Involved and complex, but also so fascinating that they would they would have the audacity to do this because there's no there's no fudging it. There's no like, oh, this is kind of questionable. This was just fleecing all of their investors, all of their employees, fleecing the entire world. There was a handful of executives at Enron who were fleecing the entire world to the tune of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars every year in revenue that apparently didn't actually exist.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty clear that at a certain point, they lost their way and that they weren't as concerned about being a company that made money. And the only thing that mattered was that as a corporation was that they kept their stock price high.

• 29:44Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Because that's where that's where all the money was. They had, as long as they could keep that stock price high and keep shareholders, especially their employees, encouraging their employees to get, you know, get paid in company stock, like use every penny of your paycheck that you can to buy this company's stock. Because Enron's stock was soaring. It was doing really, really well. And all the while, it was called pump and dump. They would drive up the value of their stock and then the upper echelon, and you see this time and time again in the corporate world, the CEOs and the CFOs and the upper management are the one who then sell off their stock and walk away with, you know, some of them hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  And, you know, some of the schemes that you talked about was they found ways to move debt around. We mentioned Fastile was one of their hires. And he was hired, I think, in his late twenties, early thirties, and quickly rose up the ranks to CFO. And he started a company called LSM, which stood for Leah, Jeffrey, and Matthew, which are named after his wife and kids, sort of ironically. It was like such a sweet tribute to them. And the only purpose of this company was to have all kinds of sort of little sub-companies that would absorb the debt and where they could move debt around from Enron to make it invisible. To the shareholders.

• 31:07Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  So they could prove on a balance sheet that you had this money coming in and the way of, you know, people investing in the company. But then you're hiding the losses and so everyone thinks you're doing great.

• 31:18Josh Clark?

  So the way that I saw it explained Investopedia actually has a couple of really good articles about this that are just wonky enough to like, understand it, but also not so wonky that you're just like, I have no idea what I'm reading. And the way they put it was basically if Enron had, like, a good example is they built a power station in India. That was a huge loss. It was just a generally bad idea and they sunk billions and millions of dollars into this power station. And without realizing any money whatsoever, I think they abandoned it before it even came online. They would take this and sell it to one of these special purpose vehicles or special purpose entities,

• 31:57Josh Clark?

  which was a tangentially related company that the company Enron was not on the hook to pay off its debts for. Right? And they would take that and then that special purpose vehicle would go out and try to sell it. Sell that terrible, toxic asset. And they would use Enron stock as the collateral. Right? And because Enron stock was just through the roof, everybody was saying, sure, we'll give you a loan. Sure, we'll give you some money for that terrible idea of a power plant that you abandoned. Because you're backing it up with Enron stock. And as long as the time that that stock came due was far enough away.

• 32:40Josh Clark?

  And as long as Enron stock kept going up, this house of cards could be held together. But that's not at all how it worked. The upshot of it is that they could take toxic assets, move them off of their books to these special purpose entities. And then they would take the money that these special purpose entities would go borrow against like that, that toxic asset and they would count that on their books as revenue. So they were hiding debt, boosting their revenues to just ridiculous heights for stuff that just should not have been counted as revenue.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and just to be clear, they didn't invent the special purpose entity and an SPE is not some evil creation in and of itself. It is, it's an entity that a lot of corporations and businesses use where it's just, it's sort of like, has a very narrow purpose in that they create this thing when they might use it to purchase an asset or to move an asset. So the company as a whole may not be on the hook if anything goes wrong. It sort of mitigates risks. So it's not some evil purpose in and of itself, but they were manipulating these such and starting all of these things under Fastile's guidance with his LSM sort of subcorporation and eventually

• 33:55Speaker 03

  LSM II, I think, that they were making, I think they hit $90 in August of 2000, market cap of the whole company at 70 billion, which made it the seventh largest publicly traded company in the world at that point.

• 34:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So that's a market cap of 70 billion. Remember in 1985, its first year, it posted losses of 14 million. Within 15 years, they posted revenue of $100 billion.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Revenue.

• 34:33Josh Clark?

  $100 billion in 15, yeah, in sales, in 15 years. That's what happened to that company when they brought Jeffrey Skilling on board. Jeffrey Skilling brought Andrew Fastile on board and people just started going nuts, making money any way they could.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, the other thing we should mention too is another sort of slick trick is that Skilling's idea, and they got approval, and I wasn't clear how or where this approval comes from, but to use something called mark-to-market accounting, which is basically when you can

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Where you can rate the financial health of your company based on, not theorize, but just on future earnings, basically, and not necessarily what they're worth that day. So anticipated future value instead of its purchase costs. Did you get how that they were approved? Because it seemed like they were all like, super psyched that they got approval for mark-to-market accounting.

• 35:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that would have been the SEC, the Securities and Securities Exchange Commission, who would have given that approval. And just like a special purpose entity, mark-to-market accounting is, it's totally legitimate. It recognizes generally accepted accounting principle. But there's a lot of room for temptation to just basically say, this deal with Blockbuster, we haven't made a penny off of it, but we can, we can cite the future earnings from it now, now that we booked this deal. And I think it'll probably be worth a billion dollars. Just a total guess. And you're not supposed to do it like that. You're supposed to do it much more realistically and legitimately.

• 36:16Josh Clark?

  But they had enough leeway that they were able to take mark-to-market accounting and use it to their, to their benefit in that way. And in doing that, they pumped up their, their revenues through the roof. Like, the deal would just be inked. They wouldn't have seen a penny from it, and they would add it to their balance sheets as revenue.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would become part of the ledger before like, a real penny was made.

• 36:38Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And sometimes the pennies weren't made. And if the pennies weren't made, don't forget, those debts would be moved to a special purpose entity. So they wouldn't have these toxic assets on their books, even though they very much owned and were indebted for these toxic assets still.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like I said, these were brilliant people. And like, they had all their bases covered, except for the fact that we all know that a house of cards will eventually fall. It's that hubris thing that just blinds people into thinking that it will always, like, when that, when that kind of money is rolling in, I think it blinds certain people so much that they don't understand, A, who it's hurting at the time, or they don't care, or they think it's always going to be rolling in like this, or they think, hey, I'm going to get mine now. Because there were people in Enron, I mean, we'll talk about a whistleblower that eventually sort of came out and journalists who are poking around.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  But there were people that started looking at this company, the darling of Wall Street, and saying, something's not right here. Like, something's not adding up. Like, you can't even explain how your cash flows through your business in a way that makes any kind of coherent sense. And anytime they were confronted with this, Skilling and his cronies would, they would get very haughty about it and just be like, well, what do you mean, we can't explain that? Like, sure, we can. It's really easy.

• 38:06Josh Clark?

  You just can't understand it.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, you just can't understand it.

• 38:09Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Oh, it makes your blood boil.

• 38:11Josh Clark?

  Let's, uh, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the downfall. How about that?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, the downfall.

• 38:31Josh Clark?

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• 40:13Josh Clark?

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• 40:37Josh Clark?

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• 41:13Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so one question that people might be asking is, how were these guys allowed to use this accounting and get away with it? Why were people even investing and buying shares of this company when it was just so fraudulent and just ridiculously fraudulent too? Not even subtly fraudulent. And the answer is, the company was such a Wall Street darling that financial analysts would not understand what they were hearing on these earnings reports, but would still give it a stamp of like, buy. The other thing that really, really helped was the banks, Wall Street banks were very much complicit in this as well. And then the thing that helped the most was Arthur Andersen,

• 41:58Josh Clark?

  the venerable 80-plus-year-old accounting firm.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  The oldest one in the country.

• 42:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was a third-party accountant to Enron. Was so cozy that they actually hired all of Enron's internal auditing staff, made them Arthur Andersen staff, and then opened a 150-person office for Enron in Enron's own, in Enron's headquarters. An Arthur Andersen office in Enron's headquarters, made up of former Enron auditors. That's who was watching the show. And so Arthur Andersen had such a good reputation that because they were signing off on this, because the Wall Street analysts were saying, "Yeah, to buy", people were just like, "I'm buying, I'm buying", and it kept the stock prices going up and up and up because nobody was paying attention enough.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was one person in the doc that said, that kind of crystallized it, which was like, I'm paraphrasing, but he was talking about the fact that when this kind of stuff pops up in corporations, like, it's not like this, the Enrons are everywhere. There is all kinds of malfeasance, for sure, in the corporate world, but he basically said somewhere along the way, "It doesn't get this big because a legal team says you can't do this", or "Your accountants say you can't do this", or "The banks say we can't get involved in this", and Enron seemed to be one of those sort of unicorns where every person along the way just zipped their mouth shut,

• 43:31Speaker 03

  even though the numbers weren't adding up, and was complicit in this.

• 43:35Josh Clark?

  Right. There was a trader that was interviewed in the documentary, who said like, "It was ironic that Enron's slogan was 'Ask Why', like, "Why does something happen like that? Why can't we do it that way?". And that this trader said, "I didn't ask myself why, because I didn't want to know. I suspected things were weird or awry, and I just didn't want to know because it was my job, I was making tons of money, and I think you could probably get that excuse out of just about anybody who was complicit in this, large or small." But Arthur Andersen, that was the one that really, really helped things along. And as we'll see, they didn't manage to survive the scandal.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, there were, oh man, there was that one part of the documentary where they were talking about Fastile's, you know, shell companies, and he was in a meeting that was secretly taped, and they're basically like, "Well, wait a minute. It looks like you're on the buying and selling sides of these transactions", and he was like, "Yeah". Basically, but I've always got L M J's interest at heart. And the whole time he's skimming money. And they believe that skilling and lay knew that like, hey, I'm sure that Fastow is is skimming money off the top for himself.

• 44:44Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Who cares because this guy is taking care of business for us.

• 44:48Josh Clark?

  Exactly, and I think he skimmed about thirty five million dollars for himself. He stole from Enron. And they looked the other way because the stuff he was doing was so unethical, so illegal that he basically earned it as far as they were concerned. To have his hand in the in the cookie jar like that. So I think you kind of mentioned there were some people who were like, wait, what's going on here? One of the first people was Bethany McLean, the journalist who ended up writing the smartest guys in the room.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  She's awesome.

• 45:19Josh Clark?

  She is awesome. She started out writing a story for Fortune magazine back in March of two thousand one titled, Is Enron Overpriced? And she was one of the first people to publicly say, how is Enron making its money? But she wasn't the first to hit on this. There's another guy named Jim Chanos of Kynikos Securities, I think, maybe. And I think he's in the documentary. But he started shorting Enron in two thousand because he noticed very simply their cost of capital, so the cost of doing business was more than their return on investment, which automatically means that they were not a profitable company, which totally was

• 46:03Josh Clark?

  contradicted by all of their earnings reports and filings. And he saw this and he said, this is, this is, this is not right. And I'm going to start making money off of the future downfall of this company and made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars shorting Enron stock starting in two thousand.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, The Whistleblower 2 was an executive main named Sharon Watkins. And she pops up a lot in the documentary, obviously is key to the story. She didn't whistleblow while this was all going on. It was sort of after the ship started sinking. But we'll talk a little bit about how that all happened and where she ended up. But what happened in August of 2021? Skilling had replaced Lay as CEO in February of that year. And on August 14th, 2021, Skilling, out of nowhere, and he had just taken the reins, you know, a handful of months before, he, Skilling quits out of nowhere. He resigns. He cited personal reasons.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  And what was going on was the, you know, the Titanic sprung a leak. And as they described in the documentary, he was one of the first rats to try and get off the sinking ship.

• 47:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and it's like, if you are a CEO of a huge company, you don't just leave like that. That is an enormous red flag. There's like a whole process and procedure for finding your replacement, grooming them, introducing them to the, to the rest of the world. You don't just leave like that. And that was such a red flag that that whistleblower, what's her name, Sharon Watkins?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:43Josh Clark?

  She wrote an anonymous letter to Lay, basically saying, hey, there's a lot of fishy stuff going on around here. And now that Skilling suddenly departed, like, everyone's going to start having questions and this whole house of cards is going to fall. And Lay apparently didn't do much about it. And she came to Lay later on and said, I'm the person who wrote that anonymous letter and I'm really concerned about this. And ended up trying to keep it in the company. Cause I think, I get the impression that she thought it was something, especially now that Skilling was gone, that could be resolved internally.

• 48:20Josh Clark?

  I think she really underestimated the extensiveness of the corruption and, yeah, at the company and thought it was a few people. When really it was in a large cadre of people who all were complicit in this. And I get the impression that's why she didn't really blow the whistle publicly at that point. But apparently Ken Lay, once he found out that it was Sharon Watkins, consulted legal counsel to figure out how to fire her legally.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the same day that Skilling resigned on August 14th, the broadband division that we talked about earlier, reported 137 million dollar loss analysts. And we should point out too, as far as the analysts go, they were always installing friendly analysts and only working with friendly analysts. But they finally got the clue. They dropped their ratings for the stock. The end came very, very swiftly for Enron. On October 12th, Arthur Andersen's, I mean, you still remember all the shredding jokes on late night TV that ran for months and months. Arthur Andersen's legal counsel said, "Everybody shred everything. Destroy every file that you have on Enron."

• 49:34Speaker 03

  And in one day, they shredded literally one ton of paper.

• 49:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that was just one day. They apparently shredded around the clock from October 22nd to November 8th. And that was just one ton, one day. They shredded literal tons of documents. Just shred, shred, shred. If you were an executive at Andersen, you were probably working a late night shift shredding alongside everybody else. It was like that. And it was apparently at a time where you could legally do that and not be indicted for it. But that was not a good look when it came out that Arthur Andersen was, the auditors of this company were shredding tons of documents. And the SEC got wind of this and they said that they're going to start investigating finally

• 50:20Josh Clark?

  the special purpose entities that Fastow had set up. And so Enron fired Fastow that same day. And I think that was in November or late October of 2000, 2001. And right after that, on November 8th, Enron said, "Hey, everybody."

• 50:41Josh Clark?

  Do you remember all of our, all that money we said we made going back to 1997? We're gonna need to restate our earnings. One of the first things they did was they reported a $618 million loss for Q3 of 2001. Q1, they posted a $406 million profit. Q2, a $404 million profit. Q3, a $618 million loss. So they finally came clean. They finally said, this accounting is off, and this is how radically it's off.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that is, if a company is restating their earnings for that period of time, at all, like mistakes can happen, but that's a, that's a real bad sign. They almost got a lifeline in, I guess, late October of that year when they tried to merge with a company called Dynegy Incorporated. And that deal, that deal fell apart on November 28th. They backed out of the deal, Dynegy did. And then, what is this, four days later, on December 2nd, Enron filed for the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US history.

• 51:59Josh Clark?

  Up to that time, $65.5 billion company filed for bankruptcy. That just did not happen. If you had that, that kind of money, you could have a fire sale and sell off stuff for way less than you paid for it, but you could still survive. And that just goes to show you like just how fraudulent this company was. They couldn't have a fire sale and make up that kind of, that kind of debt that they owed. I think it was $72 billion, I think, in debt that they finally were found to have owed. And at the time, it was the biggest, in 2008, we saw what big really was. Lehman Brothers, for example, had $639 billion in assets when it filed for bankruptcy and went under.

• 52:42Josh Clark?

  But at the time, Enron was like eye popping as far as bankruptcies went for corporations.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Can you imagine the wave of relief that swept through Dynegy Incorporated?

• 52:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  And then Ron declared bankruptcy a few days later after they backed out?

• 53:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that one just offhand conversation at the vending machine over a packet of Chex Mix, like saved Dynegy forever, you know?

• 53:10Speaker 03

  This seems like a bad deal to me, Crunch Crunch.

• 53:13Josh Clark?

  Right. And Dynegy, by the way, went on to become Apple.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  So the fallout from this, there are a lot of victims, 20,000 employees, 20,000 employees lost their job and how long did they have to get out? What is it saying in the documentary?

• 53:33Josh Clark?

  Like a day. I think they had the day.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  I think it was less than that. I feel like it was hours or something. Basically, pack your S and get out of here, everybody.

• 53:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  And like literally this huge tall building has thousands of people just leaving all day with banker's boxes with their contents of their desk in it, like the ultimate movie trope. Every employee that had been told for years and years, hey, you gotta invest everything you can in that 401k because Enron is, I mean, look at the stock, we're going places and that money will be safe there. They obviously lost almost everything. There was a, you know, the rank and file employees, there was one in the documentary that said he had about close to $350,000 in stock that he ended up dumping for $1,200.

• 54:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  They froze the stock accounts of the rank and file while upper management was actively still cashing out.

• 54:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was a really scummy move. They, I'm sure, purposefully changed 401k providers in the midst of all this. And when you do that, there's a minimum 30-day freeze as you transfer assets over. So these poor employees couldn't sell their shares, like you said, while the executives were making tens and tens of millions of dollars worth of option trades.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:56Josh Clark?

  I mean, it's just mind boggling. That to me is probably the worst part of the whole thing.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, tie with that, their severance package averaged about $4,500 for the average employees, while management bonuses totaled more than 55 million. And that's just bonuses. That's not cashing out stocks.

• 55:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  And Livia, who helped us put this together, great job on this article.

• 55:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Pointed out something like other fallout, like you'd never even think about, which was Enron was a very big investor and donor in local nonprofits in Houston. And all of a sudden, all that money is cut off. And like the Red Cross chapter had to cut its budget from $12 million to $9 million in one year, largely because the money dried up from Enron. So the fallout was far and wide. And that's not even mentioning, like we're talking about the employees who had stock in the company, like every other human being that had just stock in Enron that had nothing to do with it, lost all their money.

• 55:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the, the stock price was at 90 at one point, and it dropped down to, I think, 40 something cents in like a year, basically. So yeah, the, the employees in particular, and the retirees who had already left and whose pension funds were just totally evaporated, meaning you're going to have to go get a job as a Walmart greeter now because you can't afford anything. They are definitely the greatest victims of all this. I saw Ken Lay's lawyer afterward portray Ken Lay as the greatest victim of all of it because he apparently lost a few hundred million dollars. And he, I did, he didn't say it himself,

• 56:38Josh Clark?

  but he definitely tried to say like, I lost so much money, there's no way I could have known what was going on. And that fell on deaf ears. And that same defense was used by Jeffrey Skilling, too. I didn't know what was going on. And so what they tried to do was pin the whole thing on Andrew Fastow, who had been fired, who had skimmed 30 something million dollars himself, so had proven, demonstrated he was a criminal.

• 57:03Josh Clark?

  They made it, they tried to play like he was a rogue CFO that had done all of this under the very nose of Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay and that they hadn't known. And the public, Congress, the courts, juries, everybody said, "You have to be kidding us."

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and they were right. In the end, Fastile pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and securities fraud. In return for being a witness against Skilling and Lay, I think, had a 10-year sentence for what was going to be a much larger sentence. Ended up serving five years and then got out in 2011 and started, you know, getting paid as a speaker to corporations about business ethics. You know, to his credit, I guess, 20 years on, he, he came out officially and apologized for everything. Seems to really have turned the corner and learned a lesson, although you never knows what is going on

• 58:02Speaker 03

  in someone's heart from the outside. Arthur Andersen completely went away, the oldest accounting firm, accounting firm in the country, never recovered, completely folded and went out of business. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted basically because of Enron in 2002.

• 58:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Which was, and I remember, I remember years ago when we were working in our early days at HowStuffWorks, there was a lot of like Sarbanes-Oxley talk. Do you remember that stuff?

• 58:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because they came up with the Frank Dodd Act to, to basically undo or combat against future stuff from the 2008 financial crisis.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:45Josh Clark?

  This was the same thing, six years prior. Like, Enron was, had such a huge effect that they passed a law that basically, point for point outlawed all the stuff that Enron had done. They did the same thing with the Dodd-Frank Act, or they tried to.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  And of course, you know, certain people will say Sarbanes-Oxley has no real teeth anymore because they're not even funding the oversight that they promised. Other people, you know, the diehard free marketers will say, "That's actually too restrictive. We're not able to be competitive anymore because you've got all these rules now to make sure we're not defrauding people of billions of dollars."

• 59:21Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah. You're making it hard to exploit people. Come on. So there was actual convictions, like this is crazy. And one of the heartening things Chuck is if you watch like these congressional hearings on this, people from both sides of the aisle are grilling these guys.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:40Josh Clark?

  No one was apologizing to them for their, you know, their colleague from the other side of the aisle asking, you know, mean questions. Everyone was mad at these guys. The whole world hated Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay and Andrew Fastow.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  He was so smug up there, man, answering those questions. Like, in the face of all that, he was still so smug about it.

• 1:00:01Josh Clark?

  I looked up whether he ever apologized and I could not find it. I don't think Jeffrey Skilling ever apologized. I think he went throughout his entire time in prison, basically saying like he was a victim, that this was unfair. But he was imprisoned. He was an executive that was in prison. That just does not happen lately. He was convicted of 19 counts, fraud, conspiracy, insider trading. He got 24 years in prison and ended up serving 12, which is, I mean, yeah, that sucks, but it's still...

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  12 years is nothing to sneeze at.

• 1:00:34Josh Clark?

  No, for sure. That's a long time to do in the clink. And then Ken Lay, he was convicted on 10 counts, but he wasn't able to be sentenced because he died of a heart attack six weeks after being convicted. And I think his conviction was vacated.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, Skilling now is out and works at an oil and gas analytics startup. It seems that other people, I think we, yeah, I mentioned that Fastow was on the speaker circuit. The whistleblower, Ms. Watkins, was named Times Person of the Year in 2002. And I believe is also now a paid speaker and executive in residence at Texas State University. And then there was a matter of, because I was like, Lydia didn't get to it, but I was like, well, surely there was some sort of...

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Making it right for these people who lost all this money, right? And there were lawsuits that came out and settlements that came out. Different people ended up paying, paying different things. I think it was a $7.2 billion settlement from Enron. I believe the banks were on the hook. I can't tell if the banks were on the hook for some of that, or if it was a separate thing.

• 1:01:54Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I saw that they squeezed a total of 20 billion out of Enron before they like, let it go.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:02Josh Clark?

  I don't know, but I did see the banks were definitely on the hook, just for being complicit. I don't know if that was in addition though, either.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, uh, yeah, it says right here that the bulk of the settlements, almost 7 billion of it came from JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

• 1:02:20Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Lehman Brothers chipped in, Bank of America chipped in. The big five auditing firm, Arthur Andersen, of course, we talked about. They chipped in, I think, well, I don't see how they could have chipped in if they went out of business, but.

• 1:02:35Josh Clark?

  I guess they chipped in before they went out of business.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:02:39Josh Clark?

  So, um, you know, if you hear this story, especially if you're used to us in our podcast, you might be like, well, guys, you didn't really get to the other side of the story. There is no other side of the story. This is one of those rare stories that is basically black and white. It was just, there's no redemption. There's no explaining it away. There's no apologizing for it. It's just, it was just as wrong as it appears. So that's why we didn't include the other side of the story in this one.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think there's anyone out there who's, who's going to bat for Enron.

• 1:03:16Josh Clark?

  There's somebody, there's somebody and they will leave it on our Apple reviews.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Right, they totally will. Enron didn't get a fair shake from these guys.

• 1:03:25Josh Clark?

  Totally.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Neither did Hitler or Satan.

• 1:03:29Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  I got nothing else.

• 1:03:32Josh Clark?

  Well, I don't have anything else either. If you want to know more about Enron, go watch The Smartest Guys in the Room. Definitely will leave you wanting more. And there's plenty to read about, including some great contemporary articles all over the internet. And since I said contemporary instead of contemporaneous, it's time for listener mail.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  Uh, this is a little wordy, but it's, it's, we don't often do shout outs and tributes, but this is a really special one, so we're doing it.

• 1:03:59Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Uh, hey, guys, uh, this is from Gavin, recent college graduate and history enthusiast. And Gavin says, "I've been listening since I was 15, over seven years now. My mom was the one who introduced me to the show, and we've both been listeners ever since. I'm pretty sure she listens to every episode that you guys put out. Uh, my mom was also the person who imparted a thirst for knowledge and learning in me as a child. Uh, I've had a great many teachers in my life, and I'm very thankful for them, but my mom has always been my greatest encouragement and my role model as a student and as a person. Uh, over the past four years, in college and directly after, I got really busy, moved 12 hours from home, and it meant I stopped listening to podcasts, including you guys." I know. Uh, "More importantly, also, lost touch with my mom.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  I didn't completely ghost her or anything, but I still did not reach out to her nearly as much as I wanted to or needed to. Uh, but often when I eventually would, she would ask me if I listened to Stuff You Should Know recently, and she'd have an episode to recommend because I think you'd really enjoy this one. Uh, luckily, I now have a job where I'm having more flexible hours, and over that time, I picked Stuff You Should Know back up, re-energized my love for knowledge, and learned that my mom has given me, uh, that was, my mom had given me years ago. Uh, all this to say, you guys mean a lot to me and my mother. Uh, and I thank you for that. You've helped me stay connected to her in a way that I would not have been able to do otherwise. Uh, I'd just like to take this chance to thank my mom. I know you're listening, Mom. I know we'll talk about this episode later.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  And thank you for encouraging me and understanding that I love you, even when I'm not great at communicating it."

• 1:05:32Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Uh, boy, this one's really pulling at the heartstrings.

• 1:05:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Uh, "Every time I pick up a book, or listen to a podcast, or write a paper, I think of you, Mom, and I know that I always will. I love you, and this is the only way I know how to tell you properly."

• 1:05:47Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Gavin, you can pick up the phone and say this stuff, my friend. Eze, back to you guys. You got a great show. I hope we have many more years of remaining learning and growing together. And that lovely, lovely sentiment is from Gavin in Fayetteville, Tennessee.

• 1:06:04Josh Clark?

  That was amazing Gavin. Hats up Chuck. I totally get why you chose that shout out to be the one to break the rule.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it should have been along Mother's Day, around Mother's Day, but.

• 1:06:15Josh Clark?

  Well, we can replay it around Mother's Day for select. How about that?

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Instead, it's the Enron episode.

• 1:06:21Josh Clark?

  Right. If you want to be like Gavin and just be a super great person, but not request a shout out, just be a super great person, we want to hear from you. Also, while I'm thinking of it, go check out our social feeds. They used to suck, now they're great. Also, if you want to get in touch with us, like I said, you can hit us up via email at [email protected].

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:07:00Josh Clark?

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• 1:08:26Josh Clark?

  Listen to Voices of Vivgard on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.